Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (28 page)

For the old festival has ended so that a greater festival may begin. And of the old time nothing will be said, because nothing will be known. But the masks of that departed era, forgotten in a world that has no tolerance for monotony, will find something to remember. And perhaps they will speak of those days as they loiter on the threshold of doors that do not open, or in the darkness at the summit of stairways leading nowhere.

With considerable interest, and some disquiet, I listened while a small, pale man named Tressor told of his remarkable experience, his mild voice barely breaking the quiet of a moonlit room. It seems he was one of those who could not rest and, as a poor substitute for unconsciousness, habitually took to the streets in search of what our city has to offer by way of diversion. There are nightspots, of course, where one may pass the hours until daybreak. But their entertainments soon grow stale for the perpetually sleepless, who in any event have no use for a crowd that is wide-awake
by choice
. Nevertheless, there are certain individuals, and Tressor was one of them, to whom our city may disclose its nocturnal mysteries. In the absence of dreams that preserve the balance of the ordinary world, who would not be on the lookout for beguilements to replace them?

Indeed, there are enchantments that nearly make amends for one's stolen slumber. To gaze up and glimpse some unusual shape loping across steep roofs with a bewildering agility might well be compensation for many nights of sleepless hell. Or to hear sinister whispers in one of our narrow streets, and to follow them through the night without ever being able to close in on them, yet without their ever fading in the slightest degree—this very well might relieve the wearing effects of an awful wakefulness. And what if these incidents remain inconclusive, if they are left as merely enticing episodes, undocumented and underdeveloped? May they not still serve their purpose? And how many has our city
saved
in this manner, staying their hands from the knife, the rope, or the poison vial? Yet if there is any truth to what I believe has happened to Tressor, he just may have become lost in an exploit of uncommon decisiveness.

I should say that when Tressor told me his story, I believed it to be an exaggeration, an embellished version of one of his nightlong adventures. It seems that during one of his blank nights of insomnia, he had wandered into the older section of town where the activity is as unreserved as it is constant throughout the night. As I have previously stated, Tressor was among those who was not averse to whatever obscure caper our city might extend to him. Thus, he gave more than modest scrutiny to a character standing by the steps of a rotten old building, noting that this man seemed to be loitering to no special purpose, his hands buried in the pockets of his overcoat and his eyes gazing upon the passersby with a look of profound patience. The building outside of which he stood was itself a rather plain structure, one notable only for its windows, the way some faces are distinctive solely by virtue of an interesting pair of eyes. These windows were not the slender rectangles of most of the other buildings along the street, but were half-circles divided into several slice-shaped panes. And in the moonlight they seemed to shine in a particularly striking way, though possibly this was merely an effect of contrast to the surrounding area, where a few clean pieces of glass will inevitably draw attention to themselves. I cannot say for certain which may be upheld as the explanation.

In any case, Tressor was passing by this building, the one with those windows, when the man standing by the steps shoved something at him, leaving it in his grasp. And as he did so, he looked straight and deep into poor Tressor's eyes, which the insomniac was quick to lower and fix upon the object in his hand. What had been given to him was a small sheet of paper, and further down the street Tressor paused by a lamp post to read the thin lines of tiny letters. Printed in black ink on one side of a coarse, rather gummy grade of pulp, the handbill announced an evening's entertainment later that same night at the building he had just passed. Tressor looked back at the man who had handed him this announcement, but he was no longer standing in his place. For a moment this seemed very odd, for despite his casual, even restful appearance of waiting for no one and for nothing, this man did seem to have been somehow attached to that particular spot outside the building. Now his sudden absence caused Tressor to feel . . . confused, which is to say, captivated.

Once again Tressor scanned the page in his hand, absent-mindedly rubbing it between his thumb and fingers. It did have a strange texture, like ashes mixed with grease. Soon, however, he began to feel that he was giving the matter too much thought; and, as he resumed his insomniac peregrinations, he flung the sheet aside. But before it reached the pavement, the handbill was snatched out of the air by someone walking very swiftly in the opposite direction. Glancing back, Tressor found it difficult to tell which of the other pedestrians had retrieved the paper. He then continued on his way.

Later that night, he returned to the building whose windows were shining half-circles. Entering through the front door, which was unlocked and unattended, he proceeded down silent, empty hallways. Along the walls were lamps in the form of dimly glowing spheres. Turning a corner, Tressor was suddenly faced with a black abyss, within which an unlighted stairway began to emerge as his eyes grew accustomed to the greater dark. After some hesitation he went up the stairs, playing a brittle music upon the old planks. From the first landing of the stairway he could see the soft lights above, and rather than turning back he ascended toward them. The second floor, however, much resembled the first, as did the third and all the succeeding floors. Reaching the heights of the building, Tressor began to roam around once again, even opening some of the doors.

But most of the rooms behind these doors were dark and empty, and the moonlight that shone through the perfectly clear windows fell upon bare, dust-covered floors and unadorned walls. Tressor was about to turn around and head back outside when he spotted at the end of the last hallway a door with a faint yellow aura leaking out at its edges. He walked up to this door, which was slightly opened, and cautiously pushed it back.

Peering into the room, Tressor saw the yellowish globe of light which hung from the ceiling. Scanning slowly down the walls, he spied small, shadowlike things moving in corners and along the floor molding—the consequences of inept housekeeping, he concluded. Then he saw something by the far wall which made him withdraw back into the hallway. What he had glimpsed were four strangely contoured figures, the tallest of which was nearly his height, while the smallest was half his size. Once out in the hallway, though, he found these images had become clearer in his mind. He now felt almost sure of their true nature, though I have to confess that I could not imagine what they might have been until he spoke the key word: “cases.”

Venturing back into the room, Tressor stood before the closed cases which in all likelihood belonged to a quartet of musicians. They looked very old and were bound like books in some murky cloth. Tressor ran his fingers along this material, then before long began fingering the tarnished metal latches of the violin case. But he suddenly stopped when he saw a group of shadows rising on the wall in front of him.

“Why have you come in here?” asked a voice which sounded both exhausted and malicious.

“I saw the light,” answered Tressor without turning around, still crouching over the violin case. Somehow the sound of his own voice echoing in that empty room disturbed him more than that of his interrogator, though he could not at the moment say why this was. He counted four shadows on the wall, three of them tall and trim, and the fourth somewhat smaller but with an enormous, misshapen head.

“Stand up,” ordered the same voice as before.

Tressor stood up.

“Turn around.”

Tressor slowly turned around. And he was relieved to see standing before him three rather ordinary-looking men and a woman whose head was enveloped by pale, ragged clouds of hair. Moreover, among the men was the one who had given Tressor the handbill earlier that night. But he now seemed to be much taller than he had been outside in the street.

“You handed me the paper,” Tressor reminded the man as if trying to revive an old friendship. And again his voice sounded queer to him as it reverberated in that empty room.

The tall man looked to his companions, surveying each of the other three faces in turn, as though reading some silent message in their expressionless features. Then he removed a piece of paper from inside his coat.

“You mean this,” he said to Tressor.

“Yes, that's it.”

They all smiled gently at him, and the tall man said, “Then you're in the wrong place. You should be one floor up. But the main stairway won't take you to it. There's another, smaller flight of stairs in the back hallway. You should be able to see it. Are your eyes good?”

“Yes.”

“Good as they look?” asked one of the other men.

“I can see very well, if that's what you mean.”

“Yes, that's exactly what we mean,” said the woman.

Then the four of them stepped back to make a path for Tressor, two on either side of him, and he started to walk from the room.

“There are already some people upstairs for the concert,” said the tall man as Tressor reached the door. “We will be up shortly—to play!”

“Yes . . . yes . . . yes,” muttered the others as they began fumbling with the dark cases containing their instruments.

“
Their
voices,” thought Tressor, “not my voice.”

As Tressor later explained it to me, the voices of the musicians, unlike his own, made no echoes of any kind in the empty room. Undeterred by the implications of this sonic abnormality, Tressor went to find the stairway, which at first looked like an empty shaft of blackness in the corner of the back hall. Guided by the flimsy railing that twisted in a spiral, he reached the uppermost level of the old building. Here the hallways were much narrower than those below, tight passages lit by spherical lamps caked with dust and hung at irregular intervals. There were also fewer doors, each of which was barely more than a cutout in the wall around it and thus quite difficult to discern, more easily found by touch it would seem than by sight. But Tressor's eyes were very good, as he claimed, and he soon found the entrance to a room where a number of people were already gathered, just as the musicians had said.

I can imagine that it was not easy for Tressor to decide whether or not to go through with what he had started that night. If the inability to sleep sometimes leads a sufferer into strange or perilous consolations, Tressor still retained enough of a daylight way of thought to make a compromise. He did not enter the room where he saw people slumped down in seats scattered about, the black silhouettes of human heads visible only in the moonlight which poured through the pristine glass of those particular windows. Instead, he hid in the shadows farther down the hallway. And when the musicians arrived upstairs, burdened with their instruments, they filed into the moonlit room without suspecting Tressor's presence outside. The door closed behind them with a hardly audible click.

For a few moments there was only silence, a purer silence than Tressor had ever known, like the silence of a dark, lifeless world. Then sound began to enter the silence, but so inconspicuously that Tressor could not tell when the absolute silence had ended and an embellished silence had begun. Sound became music, slow music in the soft darkness, music somewhat muffled as it passed through the intervening door. At first there was only a single note wavering in a universe of darkness, compelling those who heard it to an understanding of its subtle voice. This lone note carried an abundance of distinct overtones, and a few beats later a second note produced the same effect; then another note, and another, each of them mingling to create an incalculable proliferation of slightly dissonant harmonies. There was now more music than could possibly be contained by that earlier silence, expansive as it may have seemed. Soon there was no space remaining for silence, or perhaps music and silence became confused, indistinguishable from each other, as colors may merge into whiteness. And at last, for Tressor, that interminable sequence of wakeful nights, each a mirror to the one before it and the one to follow, was finally broken.

•   •   •

When Tressor awoke, the light of a quiet gray dawn filled the narrow hallway where he lay hunched between peeling walls. Recalling in a moment the events of the previous night, he pushed himself to his feet and began walking toward the room whose door was still closed. He put his ear up to the rough wood but heard no sounds on the other side. In his mind a memory of wonderful music rose up and then quickly faded. As before, the music sounded muffled to him, diminished in its power because he had been too fearful to enter the room where the music was played. But he entered it now.

And he was bemused to see the audience still in their seats, which were all facing four empty chairs and four abandoned instruments of varying size. The musicians themselves were nowhere in sight.

The spectators were all dressed in white hooded robes woven of some gauzy material, almost like ragged shrouds wrapped tightly around them. They were very quiet and very still, perhaps sleeping that profound sleep from which Tressor had just risen. But there was something about this congregation that filled Tressor with a strange fear, strange because he also sensed that they were completely helpless, and yet content to be so—hypnotics in ecstasy. As his eyes became sharper in the grayish twilight of the room, the robes worn by these paralyzed figures began to look more and more like bandages of some kind, a heavy white netting which bound them securely. “But they were not bandages, or robes, or shrouds,” Tressor finally told me. “They were webs, thick layers of webs which I first thought covered everyone's entire body.”

But this was only how it appeared to Tressor from his perspective behind the mummified audience. For as he moved along the outer edge of the terrible gathering, progressing toward the four empty chairs at the front of the room, he saw that each stringy white cocoon was woven to expose the face of its inhabitant. He also saw that the expressions on these faces were very similar. They might almost have been described as serene, Tressor told me, if only those faces had been whole. But none of them seemed to have any eyes. The crowd was faced in the same direction to witness a spectacle it could no longer see, gazing at nothing with bleeding sockets. All save one of them, as Tressor finally discovered.